Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy of Montana struggled in a new interview to provide a clear explanation of the circumstances surrounding a 2015 incident in a national park that led to his treatment for a gunshot wound and receiving a fine.
In the interview with radio host and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, posted online Thursday, Sheehy left Kelly confused and warned him that Montana voters were unclear about what happened. “I just want to give you a chance to explain yourself because this is their closing message. It’s all about this incident: the voters are confused. … It’s so confusing,” she told him.
Controversy looms over a crucial Senate race in Montana that both parties say is crucial to capturing a majority in the final days of a hotly contested election.
The questions stem from several stories Sheehy has given about a bullet in his right arm.
All accounts agree that, as first reported by The Washington Post this spring, Sheehy went to the hospital after his gun went off in Glacier National Park in 2015 (firing a gun is illegal in a national park).
Sheehy was approached that day by a park ranger responding to a call of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the ranger wrote in a quote at the time and has since said so publicly. The ranger said Sheehy told him he had accidentally shot himself in the arm, and Sheehy then went to the hospital for treatment.
Sheehy now says he was never struck by gunfire on that day in 2015. Instead, he says, he was injured in a fall during the hike and sought treatment for a bullet in the arm suffered in Afghanistan during his time in the military. a Navy SEAL, a story he told during his campaign.
Sheehy said he sought treatment the day of the Glacier National Park hike because he was concerned the bullet, still lodged in his arm, had dislodged. Crucially, he said he had not reported being injured in combat, either while on duty or after his glacier injury, because it was the result of a friendly fire incident and he did not want his unit to undergo a lengthy investigation into what amounted to a small wound. , a claim he repeated in the interview with Kelly.
He was given a $525 ticket for the gun that went off in Glacier National Park and paid it, he told the Post in April, to avoid an investigation into his unit.
Kelly pressed Sheehy this week about any medical records that might help corroborate his account of what happened; Sheehy responded that such data does not exist.
“That’s not the case, I mean that’s the point,” Sheehy said. “You check it out and you leave. There is no comprehensive medical record for this kind of thing.
Kelly replied: “It’s so confusing.”
Kelly asked Sheehy directly about the injury in the park: “Just to be clear, did you shoot yourself in the arm?”
“No, that was never the allegation that the point is, you know, it was friendly fire that ricocheted downward and that was not reported at the time,” Sheehy said.
Democrats, who are fighting to help Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., win a fourth term against great odds in deep-red Montana, have accused Sheehy of not being honest about both incidents and have called for him to release medical and military records to give. to confirm his story. They have also said he must have lied about his injury, either to his military command while on duty or to park rangers and local law enforcement in the aftermath of the Glacier National Park incident.
In the conversation with Kelly, one of the few media interviews Sheehy has given as a candidate, Kelly asked the candidate if he had been injured at all during his walk in the park.
“Yes, I fell and injured my arm while walking,” he said. “So that’s why I went because I felt the bullet dislodge when, when I, when I fell and hit the arm, I felt the bullet dislodge. And then went to the ER to say, hey, look, you know, I have internal bleeding here. I injured my arm. Can you take a look at this? Make sure there’s nothing serious going on here.’
A spokesperson for Sheehy called questions about the gunshot wound “an attempt to destroy the record of a combat veteran.”
“The bullet in Tim’s arm was a result of his service in Afghanistan,” Sheehy’s spokesman said. “Tim never reported it because he didn’t want to initiate an investigation into his team, be taken off the battlefield and have a fellow teammate punished. “It was always about protecting a team member from his unit who he thought might be responsible as a result of friendly fire that ricocheted in the heat of a battle with the enemy.”
Republicans see the Sheehy race as one of the biggest opportunities in a cycle where the Senate map goes up for election in their party’s favor. The Republican challenger has led Tester in most public polls, though Democrats insist the race is not over. Former President Donald Trump is expected to win the state easily.
During the interview with Kelly, Sheehy described the complexity of fighting in Afghanistan with “Afghan forces embedded with us.”
“We call these green-on-blue incidents, which are actually very common, where you have Afghans, intentionally or unintentionally, shooting friendly troops,” he said.
Sheehy had originally said the friendly fire incident came from a fellow SEAL, writing in his 2023 book “Mudslingers” that he did not report the shooting in Afghanistan “because I didn’t want to be sent home and my team would lose, and I didn’t want the teammate who fired that shot, a total stallion who went on to a successful career as a SEAL, to be punished—officially or reputationally—by an accident that was in no way his fault.
He wrote in the same book that he was discharged from the military for medical reasons, but as NBC News reported last month, the discharge paper shows he voluntarily resigned and does not list any medical condition that forced him to leave.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
